Urban fantasy is a young and vibrant genre of speculative fiction that brings the fantastical into a modern setting*. Elves play guitar in rock bands, goblins roam our cities’ underground tunnels, and the dead rise from the graves to torment—or seduce!—the living. Those who look down on this genre and dismiss it as mere escapism would be surprised to learn about its pedigree. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, as we shall see, urban fantasy is of noble descent!

Let’s embark on a journey through time to the discovery of the origins of urban fantasy.

Origins of urban fantasy

The pioneer of present-day urban fantasy was Charles de Lint, a writer, poet, folklorist, artist, songwriter and performer (according to his official biography). His first novel Moonheart: A Romance was published in 1984, so we can consider this year as the starting point of our journey back in time.

Let’s jump in the seat of our time machine and pull the lever—back in time we go!

The most immediate forerunner of urban fantasy was horror fiction, in particular vampire novels, for example Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles (starting with Interview with the Vampire, 1976). In fact, it is difficult to tell where the vampire subgenre ends and urban fantasy starts. Horror fiction also brings mythological creatures into a modern setting, as urban fantasy does. The main difference is the mood of the stories; while horror fiction focuses on the terrifying and the macabre, urban fantasy is usually lighter in tone and puts more emphasis on world building.

The evolution of traditional fantasy in the 60s and the 70s also contributed to pave the road for urban fantasy. Some authors started to bring together science fiction and fantasy, technology and magic. The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny were remarkable in this regard. Nine Princes in Amber (1970) starts with Corwin, the protagonist, waking up from a coma in a hospital in New York. He has amnesia, but he soon discovers that he’s not from Earth. He’s a member of a superhuman royal family that rules over a world called Amber. He also discovers that our reality is just a “shadow” of Amber, and that there are infinite parallel worlds called “shadows” through which the princes of Amber can travel.

At that time, female protagonists made their appearance in fantasy books thanks to authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin and Anne McCaffrey. In general, women started to have a more active role in fantasy stories, and were no longer merely damsels in distress waiting to be rescued from some dungeon.

Romantic and Victorian periods

Now let’s move back in time to the Victorian period. There we find lots of books featuring magical objects or creatures such as ghosts, vampires or supernatural doubles. Some of those books became classics, for example Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly (1872), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898).

This interest in the supernatural wasn’t new. When we move further back in time, we discover that Romantic authors were also interested in the fantastical. The Magic Skin (1831) by Honoré de Balzac is a good example. One of my favorites is the novella Dead Woman in Love (1836) by Theophile Gautier. It tells the story of a gorgeous woman who was in fact a vampire and who fell in love with a priest. Can one find a better example of 19th-century paranormal romance?

Now we reach the 18th century; let’s stop our time machine and talk about the Gothic novel. This sort of terrifying stories grew in popularity in the 1780s to culminate in 1800 and progressively fall from grace toward the 1820s. (Read more about the Gothic novel, see also The Gothic: 250 Years of Success.) The Gothic novel was more than the forerunner of horror fiction—it set up the foundations for all genres we know collectively as “speculative fiction,” including fantasy. The Gothic novel has many similarities with urban fantasy: intrusion of the supernatural into everyday life, constant presence of tension and fear, and—importantly—female protagonists. The main difference is that Gothic stories were usually set in the medieval times while urban fantasy stories are set in the present or the near future.

Parisfal by Hermann Hendrich

Middle Ages and Antiquity

At this point, we have traveled some 250 years in the past. Can we say that our journey is over? Not quite! Let’s pull the lever again and venture even further. The wheel of time is spinning, taking us to the Middle Ages. Even there we find works that resemble urban fantasy.

Okay, not “urban” in the modern sense. Yet we find stories, poems, and ballads that tell us about magical creatures or objects interfering with people’s everyday lives. Arthurian legends are the most famous example. Do you think that Chrétien de Troyes genuinely believed in the existence of magic cups when he wrote Perceval, the Story of the Grail? Probably not, not more than Neil Gaiman believes in the existence of London Below (or does he?) For medieval authors, the Grail was a symbol, a metaphor, and I don’t see why we shouldn’t consider stories about Perceval as a medieval form of fantasy.

Our journey continues. When we go further back in time, it becomes more and more difficult to separate mythology from fantasy. The Romans, for example, took religion very seriously as it was part of their everyday life. For the Greeks, Hercules was not a fictional character, but a historical figure. People genuinely believed in sirens, ghosts, and faeries. This is where we find the true origins of fantasy, in the belief that, alongside the world as we know it, exists another reality, a magical realm where anything is possible.

Conclusion

What have we learned from our journey? We learned that, although urban fantasy is a young genre, its roots stretch back to the Middle Ages and Antiquity. It took inspiration from some of the greatest literary works in history: the Epic of Gilgamesh, Metamorphoses by Ovid, Beowulf, Perceval by Chrétien de Troyes, Le Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Malory, The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser, A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare, and other classics.

On a deeper level, we can say that urban fantasy is a genre that connects us to our distant past. By opening the doors of our cities to the magical and the fantastical, urban fantasy helps us to discover the cultures of our ancestors, makes them more understandable and appealing to modern readers.

In the next post we will talk about the genesis of urban fantasy and see how a handful of authors managed to create one of the most popular genres in history. Stay tuned!

The Gothic: 250 Years of Success. Your Guide to Gothic Literature and Culture.

In December 1764 appeared a curious book titled The Castle of Otranto. Its preface stated:

The following work was found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England. It was printed at Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529. How much sooner it was written does not appear. The principal incidents are such as were believed in the darkest ages of Christianity; but the language and conduct have nothing that savours of barbarism.

The preface went on to speculate that this story had been written during the Crusades, between 1095 and 1243. A haunted castle, a mysterious prophecy, an evil and manipulative aristocrat, two young and beautiful heroines, a forbidden love and lots of action – such are the ingredients of this wildly imaginative melodrama.

Despite an initially positive critical reception, this unlikely story could have remained a footnote in the history of literature, as did other literary curiosities. However, the following year, a second edition of this book was published, and, this time, its true nature was revealed by the author. The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story was a work of fiction written by Horace Walpole, a forty-eight-year-old English aristocrat known for his passion for the medieval period and Gothic architecture.

In this stylish, rationalist 18th century, dominated by the baroque and the Classicism, Walpole was viewed as an eccentric. He went as far as to transform his villa at Strawberry Hill (just outside London) into an imitation of a Gothic castle. In the preface to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto, Walpole explained that his book was “an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern”. In other words, he transposed his love for medieval art into literature and thus created the first neo-Gothic fictional work in history.

In the 1760s, the world was not yet ready for the onslaught of the Gothic. However, two decades later, England was ready, as were other European countries that went through radical social changes.

The Gothic novel exploded in the 1790s and the 1800s, when, in England, up to 20% of all published titles belonged to this type of literature. Paradoxically, the effects of this cultural phenomenon were as profound as the books that caused it were shallow. Few Gothic novels published in the 18th century had literary merit (those by Ann Radcliffe being among the rare exceptions). More than their intrinsic quality, it was their ability to excite the imagination of a broad readership that made them so influential. The 18th-century Gothic fiction was probably the first popular genre in the history of Western civilization; it was the prototype of what we call a genre nowadays.

The success of this early wave of terrifying novels was short-lived, and, in the 1820s, readers grew tired of this kind of story. Nevertheless, 19th-century literature would not be the same without the spark of wild imagination brought by the Gothic novel. This genre created a portal between the mysterious past and the rational present through which the power of medieval fancy could relive to inseminate the modern culture. It inspired Jane Austen to write her first novel, Northanger Abbey, a satirical, yet respectful parody of the Radcliffean Gothic. It influenced Walter Scott, the father of historical fiction. It paved the road for the budding Romantic Movement, in particular its darker forms, and we can see its imprint in Byron’s poems or in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Some literary critics viewed the Gothic as biologists view extinct species, like a relic of the past, something that had a role in evolution, but was now history. As a genre the Gothic is no more; nevertheless, as an artistic style it is as strong nowadays as it was two centuries ago. It was its ability to evolve beyond the boundaries of a genre that made it so influential and widespread.

By the first decade of the 19th century, the Gothic had invaded literature and, to a lesser extent, theatrical drama and visual arts. By the first decade of the 21st century, the Gothic was everywhere: cinema, TV, comic books, music, internet, role-playing games, video games, digital art, and fashion. Not only was it adopted by every form of art and media, but it also penetrated most genres; we can find its influence in fantasy, science fiction, thrillers, romance, historical fiction, and literary fiction.

H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) had a particularly grim vision of the future. He created a dark, yet sublime fictional universe. What Lovecraft brought to speculative fiction is the concept of world building. He did not only create a myth; he created an entire fictional world to illustrate his cosmological views. This is how he summarized his vision in the introductory paragraph from The Call of Cthulhu (1926):

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Science fiction would not be the same without H. G. Wells (1866-1946). His ideas became an integral part of science fiction culture: time travel (The Time Machine, 1895), human/animal hybrids (The Island of Doctor Moreau, 1896), invisibility (The Invisible Man, 1897), alien invasion (The War of the Worlds, 1898), antigravity (The First Men in the Moon, 1901), and many others. Wells also wrote brilliant short stories that bordered on fantasy: The Sea-Raiders, In the Abyss, The Valley of the Spiders, The Empire of the Ants, etc.

The Time Machine is my favorite. In this novel, an inventor builds a machine that allows him to travel to a distant future. He discovers that humanity evolved into two species: the Eloi, who live in a utopian society above ground, and the Morlocks, who live underground and prey on the Eloi. Wells used this dichotomy as a metaphor for the continuous struggle between the upper class and the underclass. I believe, however, that the main interest of this novel lies not in its socio-political overtones, but in the fascinating vision of evolution it presents. The Time Machine is a reflection on the future of our species and, more generally, the future of life on Earth.

The ocean is the most mysterious place on Earth. We probably know more about the other planets of the Solar system than about the depths of this vast expanse that covers 71% of the surface of our planet. Deep-sea exploration has been fascinating humankind since antiquity. In the Alexander Romance (earliest version traced to the third century BC), we find an episode in which Alexander explores the bottom of the sea in a glass diving bell.

But the ultimate classic novel dealing with oceanic exploration is Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne (French: Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, 1870). This literary masterpiece is one of the earliest science fiction novels, and it features a particularly interesting postromantic character, the “tragic villain” Captain Nemo. Jules Verne shows us that the human soul is like the abyss; one can find light even in an ocean of darkness.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is known for his mystery and horror short stories, but he also wrote in other genres, including science fiction. His best science fiction stories (in chronological order) are The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall, The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion, The Colloquy of Monos and Una, and Mellonta Tauta. We can also mention A Tale of the Ragged Mountains, Mesmeric Revelation, The Power of Words, and The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.

His only (complete) novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), bordered on science fiction and inspired masterpieces such as Moby-Dick (1851) by Herman Melville, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870) and An Antarctic Mystery (1897) by Jules Verne. Edgar Allan Poe also wrote an essay on cosmology, Eureka: A Prose Poem (1849), that can be read as a philosophical science fiction work.

About the Author

Geek, science fiction fan, novelist, and essayist, A. J. is passionate about all things nerdy. He has a PhD in neuroscience and cell biology, alongside a degree in literature, and he is a member of the Society of Authors. The mysteries of the human mind, astronomy, and quantum physics have captivated his imagination since childhood. A fan of Ridley Scott, he likes his science fiction with a dark edge.